How Difficult Is It To Find An Aristotelian Friend?

A talk at the 2025 Love & Relationships Conference

This is a short presentation I was invited to give at the recent online conference, hosted by the Plato’s Academy Center, The Philosophy Of Love And Friendship. You can watch the videorecording of this presentation here.

So, let me let me jump right in. I’m going to discuss this key distinction between three different kinds of friendship that Aristotle makes, and and talk about why that distinction might seem to make genuine friendship problematic, difficult, something daunting for us. And then I’ll talk about how the distinction can be helpful for us really helpful when rightly understood and I’ll bring in some really short considerations from a few later thinkers, including Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch.

So this distinction between three different kinds of friendship is a very influential, massively important idea which becomes essentially a common place in ancient and medieval philosophy after Aristotle. He’s making it in Nicomachean Ethics book 8, where he distinguishes friendships into three main types, along the lines of the good that the friendship is based upon.

So what is it that we’re actually looking for? So at the lowest level there is what we call friendships of usefulness or utility. And then we have friendships of pleasure. And then we have friendships that are characterized in a couple different ways, as being about the good, or the beautiful, or the noble, or where we love the person for who they actually are. And these are the things, these are the reasons why we love or like the other person, and why we have this mutual wishing well or good to them.

I do want to point out that Aristotle’s treatment is actually a lot more complex. He does distinguish other kinds of friendships and relationships. So there’s unequal friendships where there’s two different bases. For example, one person is getting usefulness out of it, and the other person’s getting pleasure. We’re not going to worry about those.

He also talks about familial relationships. For example, parent to child or spouses to each other. And there’s an additional basis there which is really well exemplified in our our saying “you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.” And he also talks about other ways we might be associated like sailors or war comrades, people who belong to the same neighborhood, people who participate in the same religious guilds or dining clubs. So we’re going to put all that aside because we’re going to keep it nice and short here.

Why is this distinction so important? Why have people been captivated with it? Well, it turns out to be really helpful for thinking our way through a lot of the controversies or confusions that might arise about friendships and relationships. And some of these are, we could say, theoretical. You know, what what is friendship itself? How many kinds of friendship? How can we order them? These are general matters we’re trying to understand.

But it’s really really useful for our practical lives, because we get ourselves into all sorts of confusions and make mistakes when we we can’t make these distinctions. Well, I think that was just as true in Aristotle’s time. It’s just as tricky back then as it is now. Maybe a bit trickier now.

So in the three types of friendship, the most paradigmatic that some people like to call ethical friendship is friendship based on the good or the noble. And it’s between people who are virtuous, people who are genuinely good people. And this is the fullest sort of friendship. The others he says are friendships by just analogy or likeness. So they’re kind of like it. They have some of the features, but they’re not truly friendship.

And here’s where it starts to get sticky for us, right? Because what’s actually going to be the case, most of us are not going to really experience in our our own lives and our own relationships, that superb type of friendship. We can still recognize it. We can still desire it. We can still talk about it. But unless we’re actually good people, maybe it’s not feasible for us. So if we look at the distinction itself, let’s start at the bottom.

Everybody can enjoy these friendships of usefulness which in Greek is to sumpheron or to ophelion. And why do we feel affection? Because we’re useful to each other. We supply some sort of need for each other. We don’t even necessarily enjoy each other’s company, but we do good things for each other. And some people might say, “Well, that’s not really friendship at all.” But Aristotle’s willing to use that term philia to talk about it.

Aristotle tends to be kind of a critic of old people. He attributes this sort of friendship particularly to them. He says, “In old age, people don’t pursue pleasure but profit.” Maybe if Aristotle lived as long as Seneca, he wouldn’t say so many things about old people, because he’d have more experience. But he also says younger people can be like this too if they’re what we call users, right? They’re motivated in life by gain rather than by pleasure. And it also includes these things that were very important for the ancient Greeks, family ties of hospitality which they called xenia. Many of you are probably familiar with that. So that’s the that’s the lowest level, right? Everybody gets to have those.

And then we have friendships of pleasure, and these are based on the pleasure that we derive from each other, or with each other. So it could be that I get pleasure from you. Or it could be that we do some pleasant activity together, like we like to watch a TV show together. And he says this is very common for young people, because they guide their lives by emotion, and pursue what’s pleasant to them.

It’s not as durable as a complete genuine friendship though. Why? Because our pleasures change over time. And so as we mature, like when we’re little tiny kids, we think candy is the best thing. And then we go through puberty, and now we’re we’ve suddenly got some real other drives on our mind. And then maybe we move on to other things.

So these are an important part of life for Aristotle. Pleasure is a genuine good for Aristotle. It’s just not the good, the best thing possible. And so he gives examples like the lover enjoys looking at the people that they’re attracted to, the beloved. And the beloved likes getting the attention. But when the beloved’s beauty fades, the lover no longer gets that pleasure, and the friendship can break down. So when you’re not getting the kind of pleasure that you would want in the relationship, Aristotle says it’s okay for it to dissolve. It makes sense.

And he says these friendships are better than friendships of utility. They have a similarity to friendships based on virtue or the good. So let’s jump to that then. The best kind of friendship, the real deal. And this is going to be based on to agathon, the good or to to kalon. He talks about people valuing and loving the other person for their own sake, not just for what they provide, or in kind of an accidental way.

There’s a there’s a catch to this, though. In order to have this kind of friendship, it’s only accessible to people who are actually good, and as he says, those who are similar in virtue. That’s why they’re able to have this really deep connection with each other, because they’re kind of naturally attractive to each other.

They’re also pleasant and useful to each other. So it encompasses those. He talks about this kind of friendship as being perfect, telaia in Greek, and being very permanent and combining all the things that a real friendship ought to have. So, this kind of friend, as he says, has been tested. So, they’re trusted. They’re not likely to screw each other over. They have all of the characteristics needed in what he calls true friendship. The Greek there is hos alēthōs, in the real or true way.

I do want to point out an interesting side note before I talk about why this is so problematic. Aristotle actually talks about friendship between husband and wife. So I think we could extend this to other committed romantic relationships as being based on natural drives, wanting to have sex for example. This is a way of combining a friendship of pleasure, enjoying romantic life together, but also usefulness. You live together, you’re useful to each other. But he says that it could also develop into a friendship of virtue.

So, it’s not like romantic relationships are just pushed off to the side and you pick or choose. You can have a real friendship or you can like be involved with somebody romantically. There’s room in Aristotle for a romantic relationship developing in that way.

Now, here’s the problem. There seemed to be some difficulties in developing this best or most genuine kind of friendship. One set have to do with the the people themselves. So if I’m going to be in that kind of relationship with you, I’ve got to be a good person. And I have to not be fooling myself into thinking I’m better than I am. I need to be genuinely virtuous and so do you. You also have to be that way. And I have to not lie to myself, or sucker myself in thinking that you are virtuous when you’re not.

So that’s already tricky, right? that’s already eliminating a lot of candidates. There’s also a contingency to friendship. We have to wind up in the right place at the right time and then it takes a while to develop. Aristotle has that famous line about eating a bucket of salt together. So spending time together. They’re kind of vulnerable to chance or fortune.

And there’s no guarantee that if two genuinely good people wind up together and spend time together, still they could decline [morally]. In Nicomachean Ethics book nine, he talks about this this question. Well, what if your friend changes, and becomes no longer a really good person? When you hear that, you might be like, well, this sucks. It’s a wonderful idea, but how am I ever going to have this?

Now, there is some usefulness to this. I think it’s really, really helpful to not confuse lower friendships with higher ones, or to imagine them to be the better kind of friendship. It’s all too easy for people to mistakenly think that friendships of usefulness or pleasure are more than they really are. This happens all the time with romantic relationships. People get involved. They’re really enjoying each other’s company, but they they’re ethically challenged, let’s say, and they think that they’re better people than they are, and that this relationship has to be much more durable.

And they lock themselves into something that’s not a real genuine friendship of virtue, but just a facsimile of it. And Aristotle would say: No, cut the ties. it’s better to go see if you can actually improve yourself.

I think one of the ways to really address this — and this is what’s going to get us to the later thinkers, but there’s also room for this in Aristotle — is to think about, if we have to be virtuous, how virtuous do we actually need to be? Aristotle is not committed to a view that you’re either vicious or virtuous and there’s nothing in between. There’s a lot in between, and it is possible to make progress in virtue for Aristotle.

Some people like to talk about this doctrine or thesis of the unity of the virtues, but that’s not actually in Aristotle. That’s people injecting that, drawing a little bit on Nicomachean Ethics book six and ignoring everything else in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he’s clear that you could actually be a just person without necessarily being a temperate person.

So, we don’t have to possess all of the virtues. I would say we don’t have to have them developed completely to the absolute heights. Aristotle thinks of virtue as something that we develop over time through work, through repetition, commitments, choices, maybe even through screwing up and learning our lessons, and then coming back and doing things better. So if you look at it that way then I don’t think it’s quite so dismaying of a prospect.

You know how hard is it to find an Aristotelian friend? Well, it depends on how you look at virtue. If we have a more realistic conception that Aristotle is advancing of what it is to be a good person, that might be helpful. And think that a clue lies in the Eudemian Ethics in book seven, chapter 2, where he says that this best kind of friendship involves what he calls mutual purpose or commitment, antiprohairasis.

So it doesn’t mean necessarily having the virtues fully developed, but it means recognizing them, valuing them, wanting to make progress towards them. And the three thinkers that I’ve picked out, I think, help us to reinforce this.

So Cicero, one of my favorite thinkers particularly on this matter, in his book On friendship, which is taking Aristotle’s ideas and going further, he says that we should look at things as they are in the experience of ordinary life, not as they are in imagination or hope. What kind of character do we need? So he gives us kind of a listing.

We want people who act and live so as to give proof of fidelity and uprightness, fairness and generosity. You want to be free from base desire and caprice and insolence, and have some constancy. And he says, let’s call those people good. He says we need to interpret the word virtue by a familiar usage of everyday life and speech, not applying what we might call hyperacademic standards of what he calls the learned.

And so this would let us include good people like Cato or Scipio, who Cicero looked to as as good examples of that. He’s saying we need to lower the bar for what we’re calling virtue. So I think that’s helpful.

Seneca has all sorts of great stuff to say about this. I’m just going to pick out two of them. In letter three, he highlights how important it is, if we’re going to call somebody a friend, we have to trust them. Don’t call them a friend if you don’t actually trust them. So he says, I would have you discuss everything with the person who’s your friend, but first of all, discuss that person themselves.

And then he makes a reference to Theophrastus who by the way is arguably Aristotle’s Aristotelian friend, his good friend and companion and then successor. Theoprastus said a lot of people go wrong because they judge a person after they’ve made them their friend, instead of making them their friend after they’ve judged them. So don’t just jump right in. I think that’s great advice. We should be willing to criticize each other and say you’re not being virtuous.

Now in letters 9 and 109 Seneca will say that the Stoic sage — and now you want to talk about virtue being like brought up to that super-high bar! The Stoic sage is that person — will not need a friend. And this has been mentioned earlier. But they will desire and choose to have friends for a variety of reasons, which include having blind spots themselves that a friend can help fill in. So I think that’s a really great idea there.

And then Plutarch has two works of his that I particularly like and often teach. One is called On Having Many Friends. Plutarch says: well you actually can’t, not in the true sense. But he does actually tell us something really cool. He says that true friendship seeks after three things above all else and notice how he’s rolling in these Aristotelian distinctions: virtue as a good thing, usefulness as a necessary thing, intimacy as a pleasant thing. And now notice two things about this. We’ve got all these rolled in together. That’s one thing. But he says it seeks after these things. He doesn’t say that it has all of these things. It’s a constant, continual process of work.

He’s also got this amazing discussion called How To Tell A Flatterer From A Friend, which I think is incredibly relevant for our own times. And he stresses the importance of the Delphic maxim, saying to “know thyself”. If we don’t want to be taken in, if we don’t want to be suckered by people who will exploit our better impulses, we need to root out self-love and conceit because those flatter us beforehand and then they make us more susceptible to flatterers who come from outside.

So what should we do? We carefully review our own nature and upbringing and education. I would say in our own time we’d look at our traumas. And, how these fall short of true excellence, how we’re not at the height of virtue. He says if we actually do pay attention to our own shortcomings, we will be looking for our own. We’ll detect our own needs, not of a friend to constantly commend and extol us to say, “Oh, you’re such a wonderful person.” But a friend to take us to task, to be frank with us, and sometimes to criticize us, to say, “You’re screwing up, man. You need to do better.”

So I think when we look at Aristotle in a more realistic way, and then we we see what later thinkers did in the shadow of Aristotle, that might be quite helpful for us. And that’s all that I’ve got for this. Hopefully this puts some ideas in your head. And if you ever have been dismayed by looking at the discussion in Aristotle, and you’re like “oh how am I ever going to enjoy this?”, maybe you feel a little less daunted by that.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.